Summary
- M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap and Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers both use the same horror movie clichés involving haunted characters.
- Cooper in Trap hallucinates his mother, while Mina in The Watchers sees memories of her sister, impacting their backstories.
- The Watchers effectively incorporates the relative hallucination trope into its central narrative, while Trap falls short in fully exploring this element.
Both M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap and Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers utilize a similar horror movie cliché. The esteemed filmmaker behind classics like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable recently had his latest feature, Trap, hit theaters. Josh Hartnett leads the Trap cast as Cooper, a father who moonlights as a serial killer. At a concert for a pop musician with his daughter, he realizes that the entire stadium has enhanced its security to locate and apprehend him before the night is finished.
The Watchers takes a much different approach to the horror genre, exploring the realm of the fantastical through the scope of a young woman. The Watchers cast is led by Dakota Fanning, who plays Mina, a troubled woman in her 20s who finds herself stuck in a haunted forest dominated by mystical creatures. Mina and Cooper are significantly different characters, but they’re both bound by a similar concept in that they hallucinate visions of their relatives.
Related
Trap’s 8 Biggest Unanswered Questions, Mysteries, & Plot Holes
M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap leaves audiences with mysteries and room to theorize about the film’s events. Here’s what we’re still wondering.
Trap & The Watchers Have Leads Who Are Haunted By Hallucinations Of A Relative
Cooper Sees His Mother, While Mina Sees Her Sister
In the case of Cooper, he sees visions of his mother. As the film later explores, Cooper’s mother was a major proponent of the extensive psychological damage that led him to his murderous ways. He sees her at the stadium throughout the film, but there’s no real explanation for why, and the hallucinations don’t impact the narrative very much. They seem placed purely to demonstrate Cooper’s trauma, but Shyamalan’s thriller only brushes on this aspect of his life.
In The Watchers, Mina sees memories of her twin sister, Lucy, adding to her backstory and motivations for the horror film. Mina was involved in a tragic car accident when she was younger that claimed the life of her mother. Because of this, she feels guilty and has spent most of her life avoiding her sister. It’s interesting that both films used this common trope for vastly different reasons. For Mina, the hallucinations are due to the film’s magical elements tormenting her.
The Watchers Explains Its Relative Hallucination Better Than Trap
Mina’s Sister Is Vital To The Story Of The Watchers
Both The Watchers and Trap had minimal success with critics, both receiving poor scores on various sites. Trap had a slightly better response, though The Watchers is the film that actually utilized the hallucination trope more successfully, as it factored into the film’s central narrative. The movie provides Mina’s full backstory, and the hallucinations allow for an interesting subtext about her reckoning with her tragic past. In Trap, not much is known about Cooper’s mom, and she could still even be alive.
Trap
3.0
Trap is a film by writer-director M. Night Shyamalan under his Blinding Edge Pictures label. The film is part of a deal struck with Warner Bros for him to direct and produce several films under their banner.
- Release Date
- August 2, 2024
- Cast
- Josh Hartnett , Hayley Mills , Marnie McPhail , Vanessa Smythe , Saleka Shyamalan , Malik Jubal , Jonathan Langdon , Peter D’Souza , Ty Pravong , Kaitlyn Dallan